In modern business office environments, many devices and systems are used to improve the speed and efficiency associated with the creation, processing, and dissemination of documents. Among these are text processing systems, fax machines, and photocopiers.
From time to time, it may be necessary to convert the text of a printed document to electronic form for text processing or communication purposes. Such a circumstance may arise, e.g., when a document created on one text processing system must be edited on another system with which there exists no electronic communication capability. The conversion process for such text may comprise optical scanning and image analysis processes. The aim of the conversion process is the generation of a computer text file, typically comprising ASCII characters, which reflects the printed text. If a printed document comprises clean, well-formed text, this conversion process may not present much difficulty.
Because of distortion effects associated with repeated photocopying and facsimile transmission, certain documents may include fuzzy, swollen (degraded) and overlapped (connected) characters which make the text conversion process problematic. The greater the degree of degradation and connectivity, the more difficult it is to accurately discern and identify printed text characters. Naturally, computer files which result from the conversion of documents which contain such text frequently include errors in their representation of the document's words and characters.